In ‘Friendship,' Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd push cringe comedy to its breaking point

San Francisco Chronicle​

21-05-2025

Cringe comedy is apparently here to stay, and the latest example is 'Friendship.'
The film highlights the talents of sketch comic Tim Robinson, a Second City and 'Saturday Night Live' alum. If you're a fan of his 'I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson' series, which has been running intermittently on Netflix since 2019, you'll likely love 'Friendship.' But his style of constant escalation doesn't mesh with my sensibilities, which generally require more subtlety.
Still, his concepts, which explore uncomfortable social and workplace interactions, often hit a painful spot of recognition. We've all been there — well, until things get super outrageous.
'Friendship' stars Robinson as Craig Waterman, an advertising executive whose big talk hides a massive inferiority complex. He not only doesn't feel respected by his co-workers, but also by his wife Tami (Kate Mara) and teenage son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer of the 'It' and 'Shazam!' movies).
The movie opens with Tami, a cancer survivor, confessing at a couples support group that she hasn't had an orgasm since before her cancer. 'I'm orgasming just fine,' Craig tells the group defensively.
Then Craig meets his next-door neighbor, Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd of the 'Ant-Man' movies, who also executive produces), who exudes charisma and masculinity. He's a TV weatherman but also plays guitar in a band and will spontaneously do things like hunt for wild mushrooms. More Information
'Friendship': Comedy. Starring Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd and Kate Mara. Directed by Andrew DeYoung. (R. 100 minutes.) In theaters Friday, May 16.
For Craig, meeting Austin is like walking through a mysterious portal into a new and exciting life. That is, until he goes too far — much too far — and spoils the friendship. That unlocks an ugly side of Craig that becomes weirder and weirder.
'Friendship' is almost a horror film instead of a comedy. In fact, Robinson has said his favorite movie is Alfred Hitchcock's 'Strangers on a Train' (1951), and one can see a bit of Robert Walker's sad villain in Craig. But what works occasionally in bite-sized chunks on Netflix — episodes of 'I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson' run about 15 minutes — becomes harder to pull off at feature-film length.
The biggest problem is, with the exception of Craig, the characters are inconsistent and will change on a dime. Rudd's Austin is sometimes a completely different person from scene to scene, as if writer-director Andrew DeYoung were trying to fit the characters to the plot requirements instead of vice versa.
Note that cringe comedy is largely a portrait of toxic masculinity. In the past six months, audiences have gotten Jesse Eisenberg's 'A Real Pain,' which won a best supporting actor Oscar for Kieran Culkin for his role as a character given to unfiltered emotional outbursts; and Michael Angarano's 'Sacramento,' about onetime best friends (Angarano and Michael Cera) who take a road trip to the state capital hoping to shed their immaturity and embrace adulthood.
Male loneliness and insecurity is a thing and the subject of much discussion in media. For me, though, there's only so much cringe you can binge.